The Man Made The Clothes.

Not a day after my post about hunting for Hawaiian shirts in Value Village, I received an e-mail from a friend, informing me that Alfred Shaheen has passed away.

This was a man I never knew by name, but have known for ages in spirit, for he invented the Hawaiian shirt. A bold man of passion, vision, vibrancy, and above all else, excellent fashion sense. In an attempt to learn more about him, I went to www.alfredshaheen.com , where I saw a few pictures, a few models... and a sidebar labelled, "vintage".

Realistically speaking, I shouldn't spend so much in these recessive times. But who could blame me for wanting to give a little something back?



Voila: the Jade Tapa Medley, a Shaheen original, dating from the late 1950s. Made in Honolulu, shipped from Honolulu. I don't know what I'm going to do to keep busy until it arrives in the mail. Besides double-check all the labels in my closet (and the nearby Value Villages), that is.

It looks like Mr. Denton has a brand new hobby. Thanks again, Mr. Shaheen.

The clothes make the man.

I hope you all had a pleasant Christmas/New Year's combo; mine was a fine old time visiting the family, but nonetheless I couldn't wait to get out and do my own meaningless thing. So when I got the chance to make a quick trip to Calgary on Saturday, I jumped.

After fulfilling my social obligations, I hit the bookstores, and found something marvelous: Bat-Manga. Apparently, for a single year in the 60s, DC had licensed a manga magazine in Japan to write their own all-new Batman stories. Here's a collection of Batman, as so many people remember him: facing a Rogue's Gallery of colourful criminals, awash in Bat-Gadgets, youthful ward at his side. Taken simply as straight Batman tales, they're a great read, but viewed through the lens of Japanese culture, they ever so slightly skewed. Perhaps it's just because we're viewing such characters for the first time. I suppose that the Penguin, for instance, looks just as odd as Karmak, a.k.a. Professor Gorilla, but we can no longer marvel at the whimsy and imagination involved in the Penguin's character.

But even better than a hooded, cape-wearing gorilla is another previously forgotten Bat-Villian: this chap was an expert plastic surgeon until a freak accident melted his face. Since then, he's been obsessed with faces -- stealing portraits, smashing clocks, even trying to destroy the Batman bust carved into the side of Mount Gotham. He doesn't have a secret identity, though: he's simply known as... Crazy Dr. Denton.



And he's a snappy dresser, to boot.

Speaking of fashion, my other stop in Calgary was at a Value Village, to look for some shirts that fit my tastes. What sort of tastes? Well, for example, I was wearing my "Hawaiian Stallion" shirt -- my one concession to Calgary culture:



I was looking through the Village for something like this. A pattern, some colour, but with slightly darker tones for contrast. What I found was a pretty good match:



Yep. I found the very shirt that I was currently wearing, on the Value Village rack.

Obviously, I'm starting a trend.

High Fashion.

Today, I booted up the ol' ATR/IR for the first time all year. The background scans were clean, and everything was well-aligned, but I still wanted to test it before we had to depend on its data. So, with a little bit of care, I was able to put a fold of my Hawaiian shirt into the the sampling area.

Now, the IR's library matching software doesn't tell you what the sample is, or what it's made of; it tells you how close it is to everything else it has in its library. Our library, naturally, has a wide variety of household chemicals, industrial chemicals, toxic chemicals, and "other" chemicals. Where would my shirt fit in?

Out of the Top 20 matches, it's (1) a 90% correlation for polyester.

And (2) a 52% match for cocaine.

Looks like that shirt isn't so much "psychedelic" as it is "stimulating".

Zebra Boy's Revenge.

I was thinking a bit more about MJ's new moniker, and I really hope it works for him this time, because he's had no luck with such things lately.

First, there were our phone numbers. As the cryptographically inclined are wont to do, we started looking for the words we could spell out. His numbers all had ones in them, making any of his words sound like second-banana AOL screennames. I, on the other hand, could read my phone number as LAW-BERT, LAY-BEST, or JAVA-DRUG (if you tolerate the superfluous final digit).

Denton 1, MJ 0.

Then, license plates. Mine starts with GPU: nothing fancy, but it could mean Golf PUtter, Gas PUmp, Grand PUbah, or Graphics Processing Unit. I can live with that.
His starts with YPF. I thought long and hard about this one, but I could only come up with one thing: Jigglypuff.

Denton 2, MJ 0.

Finally, our office extensions. Spelling out those four digits, he gets... something with a bunch of ones again. Myself? JEDI.

Denton 3, MJ 0.

At this point, we stopped playing this game. So, like I said, I hope he likes MJ -- it's sort of his consolation prize.

Well, that's all for now. Once again, I'm off on the open road. Have a good weekend, everyone!

No, it's not Zubaz.

I received a request to see the shirt I was wearing I was called a "zebra boy", and it got me thinking... but before I start philosophising, here's the shirt.

  No modelling, though; just the pattern. It's not that I'm not vain (I blog, don't I?), but I'm getting ready to drive to Edmonton tomorrow -- and at 1:00 in the morning, I just don't have the inclination to pretty up for the camera.

It's a nice shirt, by the way. Sturdy, dries quickly, irons well... a true winner in the Shirt-of-the-Day roster. I bought it for $15 from a street vendor on Whyte Avenue in Edmonton, and I wore it home. It wasn't until I took it off that evening that I realised it had dragons on it -- always a plus.

But dragons and zebras aren't the same thing. Sure, there are vertical stripes, but aren't zebras supposed to be a little less colourful?

Of course, there's an exception to every rule. Voilà! I never expected our Section Head to have a sweet tooth, but there you have it -- incontrovertible evidence. Oh, and according to the all-knowing Internet, the zebra's name is "Yipes". I'm not sure if that's better or worse than "Zebra Boy."

I find the whole incident fascinating, simply because I've always believed that names have power. True, a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, but the word is what connects our mind to the outside world. Perhaps a rose without a name would never be more than a generic wildflower.

And nowhere is that more felt than in names given to us. In Capoeira, you're given an apellido by your mestre. In Deaf culture, names are special signs only given out by people in the Deaf culture. And even though I've used the handle "Aquadeo" for eight years, it'll always have the caveat of being chosen by me, and that always irks me just a little. It's why I'm content to risk my public identity on the Internet, and sign this blog as "Denton" instead.

Then again, maybe people who were named "Denton" by their parents fixate on these things more than others.

The Bon Mot, The Bad, and The Ugly.

The Good:

During a three-hour power outage yesterday, a group of us decided to pass the time with an impromptu Pictionary tournament. As my boss furiously scribbled away, his partner shouted out, "it's a place on Earth."

At which point, I turn to my teammate and comment, "They say Heaven is a place on Earth." It wasn't quite what Belinda Carlyle sang, but the timing still made it a perfect moment.

The Bad:

When the DRDC's Senior Military Officer sat down at our table at the staff Christmas party, he was affable, good-spirited, and conversational. I didn't have much expertise in the field he was discussing, so I was content to just sit back and listen. However, when the cameras came out, I leaned forward intently, joking that I wanted to look "involved."

At least, I wanted to say involved... but somewhere in my brain, the vocabulary center intercepted the command, and said, "Pfft. Involved? 'Fascinated' has twice as many syllables. Use that instead."

So, here's something they should have taught us at the Ottawa training session: if you want to be a good employee, simply insult someone at the top of the org chart, and you'll be on your best behaviour for the rest of your career (however short that may be).

The Ugly:

There isn't really a dress code at the lab, but I'm the only person who really takes advantage of that fact. Our Acting Section Head doesn't mind, though -- in fact, she seems to get quite a kick out of my Hawaiian apparel. That why she truly and sincerely meant this as a compliment...

"It's just great that someone here is willing to be so silly, like a... a... zebra boy!"

Zebra boy?

There's a lesson here: Don't be too proud of yourself for being able to pointlessly regurgitate pop culture references. It doesn't make up for all the other stupid things you say, and a single original phrase from someone else will outclass you entirely.